Ramon Estrada explains resilience as an internal battery: higher energy leads to clearer thinking and sustained performance. Three techniques: shift depleting emotions to renewing ones through deep breathing, mentally rehearse challenges to prepare your response, and reconnect with your true north to build an extra energy reserve.
Today I am going to talk about what is resilience, its importance, and 3 techniques on how you can build it to improve your personal performance and your team's performance. My name is Ramon Estrada. and I help leaders to grow their organizations through creative and innovative approaches. What do you think when you hear the word resilience? Can it be flexibility, strength, endurance, and even bounce— bouncing back from adversity? Let me share with you a definition from HeartMath about what resilience is. Resilience is the capacity to prepare for, adapt from, and recover from adversity, challenges, and even stress. And now you may ask, why is it important to be resilient at work, and maybe personally or with your team? Resilience, let's think about it as an energy within an internal battery that we have. The higher the energy that we have, The more clear we will think, the more calm we will be, and actually we will last longer working individually and as a team. So this is extremely important for any leader to be resilient, so by the end of the day you are not depleted. Today we will go over 3 techniques that will help you to develop your resilience at work. The first technique is to develop an emotional resilience. What do I mean by this? Our emotions, physiologically speaking, are of 2 kinds. We can have depleting emotions or renewing emotions. Depleting emotions lowers the inner balance or the level of energy that we have in our resilience. The renewing emotions will charge it, will give us more energy. Imagine that you are throughout the day and then something unexpected happens that you do not like. Probably you will feel an emotion that could be related to stress, but could be fear, could be anxiousness, or whatever you're feeling. Probably you will need to get this energy in your inner battery to address this situation. This is why having an emotional resilience is deeply important. How can you increase it? Easy. You need to focus on renewing emotions. What do I mean by this? When you are facing something that is important, that is stressing you, what you need to do is first take a deep breath in and a deep breath out, thinking in the chest area. By this way, you're taking control of how your heart is beating. And the second step will be to think of something that you really like, something that brings you joy, happiness, or even thinking of a challenge as a learning experience. In that way, you are transforming a depleting emotion into a renewing emotion, and your emotional resilience will grow. The second one is accepting and preparing for adversity. We all know that plans do not go as we think they will. Plans are just a direction, an idea that we have in our mind and that we are executing it. So it's deeply important to recognize when adversity or an obstacle will happen, or something that makes us uncomfortable. Have you had a situation like, I don't know, when you want to to present something important for you, for investors, a quarterly report, and you know that you will be speaking publicly, maybe with the boss or with investors. Who knows? So if you know already that you're going to be facing adversity or something that will require an extra energy, think about it. What kind of emotion, what kind of body of presence you want to build? Facing this in your mind and addressing it, probably rehearsing a little bit of how will your body be, how will your breath be, how will you be talking— this will embody how you will be facing this adversity and will prepare you properly. And by doing that, you will be able, in case something goes even stranger than you thought, To bounce back. And finally, who cares how you did it if eventually you gave your best? You rehearsed in your mind and you were prepared. Think about it, this adversity, this outcome, as a learning experience and prepare better for the next one. The 3rd technique is to focus on what really matters to you and your team. Adversity will show, you will have challenges, So this is deeply important to have an extra reserve of energy, resilience, for you to face it, for you to win. How can you do this? When adversity shows, probably taking a deep breath and realizing what makes you wake up every morning. What's the purpose of yourself showing in the office or showing in your company? Remember that, because our values, we are more than what we are doing at work one day. We want to do more, and especially if you face and you have discovered your true north. This is what authentic leadership is, is showing ourselves, being present, and also when our values are challenged by problems, we can redirect ourselves in a better way. And actually, if the problem is really small and our values show us that we are probably working because we want to show the world our value, or we are doing this for our families, then everything will be relatively— the comparison will solve the problem. We will take things not in a really serious way. So the next time that you face an adversity, Think about what's really important for you, not in the next day or the next week, in the next month, in one year. And this will give you the extra boost to go around adversity if needed, or to deeply destroy it. So just remember the importance of resilience as the capacity to prepare, to adapt, and to recover in the face of any challenge or adversity. That will allow you to stay calm, to think clear, and to focus. Thank you for watching, and don't forget to subscribe to my channel because every week I will be sharing videos on resilience, leadership, creativity, and innovation. Take care.
